Culture

Culture Addict: The Stack Recommends

Our editorial team share their week in culture: where we’ve eaten, what we’ve read and where we’ll be heading in the coming days

By Isobel Van Dyke

3 July 2021

Rhea Cartwright - Beauty Director

This week’s choice of entertainment

Perhaps it’s the end of Mercury retrograde or the full moon but it’s felt like a fraught two weeks for me. No amount of reading or podcasts will cut it for me but music is always an instant mood-booster. I’ve been blasting a combination of Tems, Mayra Andrade or Sasha Keable on Spotify to keep me in my feelings and get it all out.

Where I’m spending my weekend

I’m going heavy on the self-care this weekend with lots of restorative yoga and sound baths at Indaba Studio. It’s tucked away in Marylebone but it’s fantastically located if you’re looking for a studio whether you’re an expert on inversions or just want to lay in child’s pose for an hour.

Something I’m looking forward to

Booking a table at Carousel. Coincidentally also based in Marylebone, the restaurant has announced their latest line-up of guest chefs which focuses on 6 Black chefs who work at some of the most-famed restaurants but don’t get the recognition. From 25th June to 23 July and in collaboration with photographer Julian George’s Make You Look exhibition, each of the one-off menus will showcase the best of modern African and Caribbean cuisine.

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How Rhea will be spending her weekend - with Carousel Restaurant and Sasha Keable

Emma-Louise Boynton - Contributing Editor

This week’s choice of entertainment

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what our post-pandemic world might look like - how it might be different. Worse? Improved? The phrase ‘build back better’ is being bandied around a lot at the moment, but the blue-sky political thinking and attendant policy-making that is surely requisite to this promising sloganeering seems lacking. And so in pursuit of some inspiration I’ve returned once again to one of my favourite BBC radio series - ‘My Perfect Country’. Over the course of some 22 episodes, the show explores policies that have worked in countries all around the world in order to imagine what a manifesto for a ‘perfect country’ might look like if we pulled all these brilliant policies together. Something to make you hopeful.

Where I’m spending my weekend

Earlier this week, I took a wander around poet, author and artist, Charly Cox’s new exhibition ‘Wish you were here’ on Greek Street. A lifelong hoarder, Charly’s exhibit showcases a miscellaneous collection of things she’s stuffed under her bed over the years - from a collage showing all the receipts she’s held onto after dates (both good and bad), to a framed pair of slippers she wore when she sat at a bar in LA sipping on whiskey while new in the knowledge that her boyfriend was cheating on her, to a little framed box with the window lock from her childhood home in it (she figured that if she took out the lock, her parents wouldn’t be able to sell her beloved home. ‘Who would want to buy a house in which you couldn’t lock the windows?’ She rationalised).

Scrawled across each of these framed odes to her past is a poem capturing the symbolic, often sad, memory held in whatever throwaway item she’s transformed into an art piece. As I walked around the show I had goosebumps, and started to cry silent tears as I stood in front of her collection of date-receipts. It made me think with a new appreciation about how the trails of things I leave behind, however big or small, are all reminders that whatever I do or don’t achieve, however much money I make, whoever I become, ‘I woz ere.’ And there’s value in that. I’ll be going again this weekend, with my best friend in tow.

Charly Cox: Wish You Were Here: Postcards from the Past exhibition. (Runs from 30 June to 7 July at 59 Greek Street, Soho).

Something I’m looking forward to

While pondering what’s possible in this post-pandemic world I happily stumbled across a review for Anna Neima’s temptingly titled new book ‘The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society’. I promptly ordered a copy and requested Anna join us on The Stack for a future Culture Shot book club, which she has kindly agreed to. Details to be announced soon. So, get to reading.

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Emma-Louise will be spending her weekend at Charly Cox's new exhibition in Soho

Charlotte Roberts - Contributing Editor

This week’s choice of entertainment

I’ve been reading a lot of books about mushrooms and fungi this week after listening to an excellent podcast with Merlin Sheldrake. His book Entangled Life is a fascinating insight into how fungi support and sustain all our living systems. It really brought lots of new ideas to light and is a very soothing read in this current state of perpetual anxiety. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins continues the mushroom theme, charting the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms and is a really unique take on the topic without ever feeling preachy or pious.

Music wise I’ve been playing Okay Kaya on repeat, her cover of Cher’s Believe is hauntingly heartbreaking and perfect for a little wallow after the bombardment of the endlessly ridiculous news cycle.

Where I’m spending my weekend

I’m excited to check out the new Pedler restaurant on Queens Road Peckham, I used to love the food at the Peckham Rye branch and this new one continues the theme along with lots of cosy, intimate decor. Perfect for a Friday night small bite and drink. Kudu is also great and just down the road, I’ll try some brunch there on Sunday, they have really dynamic, thoughtful dishes and it’s nice to see these new independent places open and flourishing again

Something we’re looking forward to this week

Looking through my archives of art and fashion books. The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes is the ultimate menswear reference book. It’s curated by Raf Simons and Francesco Bonami and is stuffed full of interesting references from fashion, to film, to art. It’s a rare book and is always my go to when I feel like I need some inspiration.

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How Charlotte will be spending her weekend, at Pedler restaurant in Peckham

Aimee Green - Social Media Director

This week’s choice of entertainment

I’m waiting on Fairy Tales, a photo book by it-girl artist Petra Collins and Euphoria’s Alexa Demie. Then, on the television, I’m back binging the Veronica Mars season one box set for a study in sarcasm and re-renting Emerald Fennell’s feminist revenge thriller, Promising Young Woman. Watch it and weep.

Where I’m spending my weekend

I'll be at the local art supply shop, picking out pearls. Think: Martha Calvo’s ‘It’s All Good Necklace’ and Vivenne Westwood’s ‘Mini Bas Relief Chocker’. I don’t have the patience for international shipping, so am sitting down with a bottle of Resiling from Queenstown’s Amesfeild Vineyard and threading these necklaces myself.

Something we’re looking forward to

A reservation at Naumi Hotel in Wellington for its emerald green parlor. It’ll be my first visit back to the city since graduating as a broke art student in 2016. Starting with brunch from the Moore & Wilson deli, I’ll follow this with a fish dish at Ortega at 7pm and a ‘Lower Hutt Lemon Meringue’ cocktail at The Library.

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Aimee is spending her weekend hand-making necklaces in Vivienne Westwood style

The Short Stack

The Stack’s guide to London leisure.

By Isobel Van Dyke

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